How to bake John Whaite’s Mojito cake | Baking Bad

In episode one of our (potentially regular, but don’t hold your breath) new series, the MWSAB team decided to take on a recipe from the awesome new book from John Whaite: John Whaite Bakes At Home. Naturally, we wanted to bake something a bit unusual, so we went for the Mojito cake, which definitely ticked that box and had the added bonus of containing booze. After gathering our ingredients, we headed to the kitchen with a sense of trepidation, excitement and hunger. Here’s what happened…

You need a quite a few ingredients for this, but there’s nothing crazy so you should be able to find them all easily in your local supermarket. We made a mistake in buying golden icing sugar rather than the normal stuff, but it tastes pretty much the same. We think.

Teamwork is vital. Never forget that.

Rum is vital. Never forget that.

The delicous creamy filling, featuring rum, mint leaves, icing sugar and double cream. Note the zesty limes as well. This cake is both tasty and healthy.

Mixing the batter. Ben cannot stress enough the importance of making sure you whisk your egg whites to stiff peaks, so much so that you can hold the bowl upside above your head and it not fall out. He actually tried this, and fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on what you think of Ben), they did indeed stay put.

Adding the cream filling, on top of a layer of lemon curd (we couldn’t find lime curd in our Sainsbury’s local, but they are pretty much the same thing aren’t they? Citrus).

Leave it to cool/rest/sink, and within a few hours you’ll have a delicious cake fit for a king.

And here’s the finished thing. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?

So, that was fun. Sure, we can probably work on our presentation, but the taste is second to none. If we baked it again we’d make sure we had lime curd, use the correct icing sugar, and leave it to cool for a lot longer before adding the curd and cream filling. But you live and learn, and baking is a journey. Reactions in the office ranged from ‘That’s delicious!’ to ‘Is that a quiche?’, via ‘Well that’s got too much booze in’. But overall, we’re proud. Well done John on creating such a damn fine recipe. We hope we didn’t make too much of a mess of it.

Think you can do better? You’re probably right. The recipe is taken from John’s new book, John Whaite Bakes At Home, which is out NOW people. Pick up a copy and show us what you’ve got.